At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

The central characters in
these books for very young readers practically ooze charm. And that’s not all
that Snippet oozes – he is, after all, a snail, even if he does have a shell
that appears to be made of patched denim. Snippet is clearly not a very realistic snail, and that matters not at
all in this story of a family whose members have different waking-and-sleeping
patterns. Snippet likes to get up early and start playing, but his parents and
sister (each sporting a differently colored and patterned shell) prefer to
sleep late. Snippet is otherwise just an ordinary snail who happens to make
sculptures, play soccer with pillbugs (using them as balls), and love piggyback
rides atop his parents’ shells. (Anyone who wants some facts about real snails can find them on the book’s
inside front and back covers.) Bethanie Deeney Murguia shows Snippet and his
family curling up for the night underneath a leaf – a place where snails really
do sleep – and then shows Snippet’s vain attempts to get everyone up the next
morning. Various bug friends offer to help Snippet get the family to wake up,
but the suggestions by Grasshopper, Cricket, Ant and Firefly do not work, and
Snippet declines Stinkbug’s offer to “stink them out.” Then Snippet, watching
Caterpillar having his breakfast of leaves, has an idea of his own, and manages
to get everyone up while serving them breakfast in bed, snail style. So all
goes well, and everyone has a great time all day, and then – well, as the day
draws to a close, it is Snippet who falls asleep while everyone else stays
awake, setting the stage for a repeat of the whole process the next morning. Snippet the Early Riser has no message
beyond the soft-pedaled one of accepting other people’s differing circadian
rhythms, but it does not need any
message – it is simply a warmly amusing tale, nicely told and very pleasantly
illustrated.

However, there is a message in Rodrigo Folgueira’s Ribbit! From the way the book starts,
with Poly Bernatene’s wholly apt picture of a pink piglet sitting on a rock in
the middle of a pond and talking frog talk – to the consternation of all the
frogs – you might expect the message to be along the lines of, “Be yourself.”
But that is not it at all. Folgueira and Bernatene turn the book into a small
mystery story about a very cute but apparently clueless piglet and a set of
animals trying to figure out just what is going on. The raccoon, weasel and
parrot who come to see the strange little pig cannot offer the frogs any clues,
so the chief frog decides to pay a visit to “the wise old beetle,” who is
usually unapproachable but will surely help out in this particular case. The
frogs and other animals, “all talking at once,” try to explain the oddity to
the beetle, who decides he had better head for the pond and see for himself
what is going on. And when he arrives, he finds – nothing. The piglet is gone. Now
the animals are really puzzled, but
the beetle gives them an offhand suggestion that comes to them as a revelation
– proving his wisdom and sending all the animals off to find out where the
piglet has gone so they can join him in a hilarious final page that clearly
provides the message that friendship conquers all.

The perky personality of
Fancy Nancy is always front-and-center in Jane O’Connor’sbooks about her. But she shares the limelight
in Fancy Nancy: Puppy Party with her
dog, Frenchy, for whom Nancy and her parents are making a birthday party –
complete with a bacon-chicken-carrot layer cake with yogurt icing and rawhide
strings instead of candles. The scene of Nancy giving Frenchy a pre-party bubble
bath as Mom looks on, nonplussed by the mess all over the bathroom, is
delightful, and later scenes of the other dogs and people arriving for the
party are almost as much fun. This is a short book and not one with a very
surprising plot – the dogs will romp and play together, and of course that
beautifully crafted cake is going to wind up a total mess; and that is exactly
what happens. But all the guests, canine and human, are so good-natured about
everything, and the pictures of the delightful sloppiness are so amusing, that
dog-owning families are likely to be tempted to try a canine birthday party of
their own – although perhaps one a little less exciting than this. Fancy Nancy’s
perkiness shines through everything, even when she scolds Frenchy for jumping
on the cake and then finds herself giggling along with everyone else at what
has happened. By the final page and Nancy’s comment that Frenchy considers the
party “the greatest birthday celebration ever,” readers will be thoroughly
charmed – as is so often the case in stories about the très
charmant Fancy Nancy and her pleasantly indulgent family.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is
not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings,” states Cassius in
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But it
is a fair bet that even Shakespeare never considered the fated power of the
mustache. Bridget Heos makes up for this unjustifiable omission with Mustache Baby, an absolutely hilarious
book about a baby named Billy who happens to be born with a mustache – which,
the nurse says, is sure to assert itself over time as a good-guy or bad-guy
type. Joy Ang’s picture-perfect illustrations show just what that means, as the
family watches with a mixture of hope and trepidation to see whether Billy will
become a good or bad mustache-wearer. Goodness seems ahead at first, and there
are multiple marvelous scenes of Billy as a helpful cowboy, a pint-size
policeman, and even a pilot, sword fighter and doctor. But, alas, after a
while, the ends of Billy’s mustache start to curl up, and soon he accordingly
turns evil, for example becoming “a train robber so heartless that he even stole
the tracks.” But just as he makes his getaway from a bank robbery (a piggy-bank robbery), Mom catches him and
puts him immediately into jail…that is, his crib. Later, Heos explains, “his
mother busted him out” and reassured him that “everybody has a bad-mustache day
now and then.” The book ends with a very surprising playdate – but its real
charm is in the way the story connects the mustachioed Billy with every toddler
and post-toddler everywhere, prone to periods of sweetness and times of
tantrums, occasions of obedience and others of mischief-making for its own
sake. Billy, despite his appearance, could be any preschooler, and those young
readers who happen not to possess a mustache of their own will nevertheless
recognize their own feelings and behaviors in this charming book – provided
that adults read it with them and point out the parallels.

Older kids can do their own
reading about what destiny means and does not mean in the story of 11-year-old
Emily Elizabeth Davis, who has been told that the fact that she is named after
Emily Dickinson means that she too will become a great poet. The Dickinson
connection is explicit – Emily has a first edition of Dickinson’s poems in
which her mother has noted highlights of Emily’s life, including the name of
the father Emily has never met. But the book goes missing, and of course that
is symbolic of Emily not knowing where she is in life and where she is going to
go. Emily is a fairly straightforward character, accompanied in her search for
the book by a more-intellectual best friend and a younger cousin with his own
confirmed notions of how mysteries are solved (with Morse code, among other
things).Emily also writes a series of
letters to Danielle Steel, who is about as un-Dickinsonian a writer as can be imagined.
The quest here is largely free of intense emotion (despite the issue of Emily’s
father), and the interactions among the young protagonists are nicely handled.
The chapter titles frequently deal with the “destiny” theme: “The way the tree
sitters planned to change the destiny of a cluster of old oak trees,” “The odds
of being dumped in front of a store that was supposed to be across town but
might be here instead,” “The way standing in a shower can win you the Nobel
Peace Prize,” “The acorn that was supposed to be an olive branch,” and so on.
The book is, of course, a coming-of-age story and a learning-who-you-really-are
story, and the comparative mildness of Emily’s search is actually a relief when
compared with all the angst-fraught preteen adventures that dominate
young-adult publishing nowadays. The “destiny” angle is somewhat overwrought,
though, and the plotting is such that when a chapter appears called “The
possibilities that appear when you least expect them to,” readers are not
likely to be at all surprised. Destiny,
Rewritten is a (+++) book that is pleasantly rather than frenetically paced
– a plus – but has a bit too much mildness about it. For example, Emily is
naïve to the point of complete innocence, but there is no problem with her going
to all sorts of places unsupervised. That is, she is quite unworldly, and the
world in which she lives seems rather unworldly, too. There is an inevitable and
thoroughly unsurprising happy ending that readers who care for Emily will
surely enjoy; it is all in line with one of Emily’s letters to Steel, which
says, “everyone’s life changes in the end, leaving them happier than they ever
expected to be.”

Here we have, at
conservative estimate, about the 2,345,678th diet book published in
the last, say, three weeks. Except it is really not that cookie-cutter a work,
or it would scarcely be worthy of notice at all – the flood of this diet and
that diet and the other diet has nearly reached saturation point, and the only
reason publishers are not embarrassed is that the books continue to sell to an
ever-heavier nation in which people are looking, once and for all, for the
simple solution to being overweight.

News flash: there isn’t one.
The way you lose weight is by eating less. If you couple that with exercising
more – not even necessarily formal exercise, but pretty much anything that gets
you in motion regularly and keeps you there until your heart rate rises and you
work up a sweat – you will do even better, because your metabolism will
increase and the reduced amount of food that you eat will be processed more
quickly and efficiently, and will help you build muscle rather than fat (which
is simply the body’s storage place for energy not needed now but possibly required
in the future).

The two registered
dietitians who founded Appetite for Health – yes, one of the 2,345,678 Web
sites devoted to this subject; you can check it out at www.appforhealth.com – have the good
sense to address the diet issue as a behavioral one above all. And they go
beyond the usual “don’t snack while watching TV” admonitions to address 101
behaviors that they deem “Fat Habits,” and then offer “Slim Solutions” to every
one of them.

This approach will not
appeal to everyone; for that matter, it won’t work for everyone. But it is clever, internally consistent and has
the potential to help those people who do
follow it take weight off and, believe it or not, keep it off.Fat Habit #80, for example, talks about
living in a neighborhood that helps make you fat by being filled with
“innocent-looking delis or convenient 7-Elevens [that] are just waiting to lure
you in and tempt you.” This is a genuinely unusual viewpoint, and so are the
recommendations that Julie Upton and Katherine Brooking make: don’t leave home
on an empty stomach; keep good-for-you snacks with you to eat if you get hungry
while out and about; if you know your usual route takes you past a place whose
food is too tempting to resist, plan an alternative route and stick to it. This
sort of creativity permeates The Real
Skinny and is the best reason to read it. But the recommendations often
carry the seeds of their own potential destruction – what if, for example, that
much-too-tempting place happens to be next door to your office or your
children’s day-care center?

Still, every listed Fat
Habit, even the questionable ones, will make sense for some people. If you deliberately avoid eating fat because you think
it makes you fat (Fat Habit #31), for example, the authors say to get real:
“fat is essential to your health,” but you must learn which fats are good and
which are not, and plan your eating accordingly. Fat Habit #39 is an intriguing
one: it says that vegetarians need not be concerned about getting fat. Wrong,
say Upton and Brooking: “Being a vegetarian does not guarantee you good health or a healthy weight if your calories
are coming from the wrong foods.” Their Slim Solution is to count calories, eat
a variety of foods, and be sure you get proper nutrition – nothing unusual or
exceptional there, but the habit itself is one you would not expect to see
listed.

Upton and Brooking also
offer recipes and many specific suggestions about what to eat – for example, in
dealing with Fat Habit #85, which relates to knowing what to do but having
trouble planning how to do it. The authors also spend some time, inevitably,
discussing exercise, and here the Fat Habits are not unusual at all: #89 is
about not having enough time, #90 about being self-conscious, and so on. Nor
are the Slim Solutions anything out of the ordinary, ranging from making good
use of the time you do have to “just
try something [and] you’ll feel more self-assured and more confident.” Still,
if not everything in The Real Skinny
is surprising or innovative, that is just the way things are: again, the only
way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more.

“Losing weight is a
relatively easy proposition,” write Upton and Brooking. “Eat fewer calories than
your body requires and you lose weight. Keeping it off, however, is another
story.” And that is the issue that The
Real Skinny addresses, sometimes in clever ways and sometimes in mundane
ones. Like other self-help books – whether related to food or to anything else
– it will not help unless you bring to it an open mind and a willingness to
invest time and mental energy (physical energy, too) in its recommendations.
Motivation is one thing that no authors can supply. But if you are feeling
frustrated at your inability to stay
at a weight you find comfortable – which is different from getting to a target weight – then The Real Skinny is certainly worth reading. Search for the Fat
Habits that seem most applicable to you – not all of them will apply to
everyone, by a long shot – and see whether making a few changes along the lines
of the book’s Slim Solutions seems to help you stabilize your weight. If so,
that may be all the motivation you need to try even more of the recommendations
here. Not all of them are for everybody, but there is enough good sense in the
book so that most people will be able to find at least a few techniques that
will be helpful in their individual situations.

Travelogues have a long and
honorable history, as well as a sometimes checkered one (think of Gulliver’s Travels). Matt Gross, editor
of BonApppetit.com and a frequent contributor to the New York Times travel section, certainly fits The Turk Who Loved Apples into the historical pattern, but readers
not familiar with or enamored of the style of the Times should be forewarned that this book, broken down into a
sufficient number of parts, would fit into that newspaper’s pages very well
indeed; indeed, these are basically
newspaper and magazine essays, modified to form a book-like connected
narrative. What Gross does is elitist travel posing as “getting to know people”
– travel in which he disdains tour guides, guidebooks and travel agents and
uses the Internet only in limited ways. There is abundant room for First World
guilt and soul-searching about Third World countries, for instance, presented
in the vocabulary and the adjectival and adverbial style favored by the Times and other “high-class” media and
sometimes making it seem that travel writers are paid by the word: “Spend
twenty-four hours in Southeast Asia, of course, and you’ve got a history with
hookers. They are tragically, stereotypically, everywhere. …They can be
aggressive, bashful, bipolar, stoned, confused, haughty, alluring. …And this is
only the beginning – there’s a whole rainbow of prostitutes, an infinite
spectrum of the savvy and the innocent, the willing and the enslaved, the vigorous
and the ailing and the desperate. …Are you supposed to be offended by the
intrusion of their presence into your vacation? Or amused, as if they’re
scenery in the louche, Third World atmosphere?” Much of the book is like this –
very well written in a very New York if not quite New Yorker style, elevated and erudite and seeming to stand back
from and examine experience even while experiencing it. It is scarcely
surprising that Gross names Argentina and Vietnam as his favorite countries
among the 60-plus he has visited – because of their “energy.” And it is equally
unsurprising that he has little interest in returning to Germany or Croatia,
which he found “boring” in their resolutely ordinary (to him) everyday pace of
life. Gross says the best way to enjoy travel – and keep it affordable,
although it is hard to imagine him really “roughing it” – is to make friends
with the locals and let them help you with their natural hospitality and
warmth. This is surely a wonderful experience when it happens, and it is surely
more likely in a genuinely unplanned “losing my way” trip than in a carefully
guided and managed one (although Gross never seems really to lose his way, even
when he gets lost here and there). Gross is more than a privileged American –
he is a privileged American journalist,
frequently traveling on assignment and on someone else’s money, and all his
protestations of simply being a tourist evaporate whenever he pauses for
self-consideration, as when he cannot figure out what to write about Chongqing:
“…I considered fleeing not just the city but the country. Could Cathay rebook
me to Hong Kong or Japan? …This trip was an adjunct to an assignment for
another magazine; it would barely cost the Times
a thing; it would be okay.” Gross certainly writes well – in a particular style
that some will like and others loathe; and whatever you may call him or he may
call himself, he is certainly well-traveled and has met and written about some very interesting people. Probably The Turk Who Loved Apples will be of most
interest as a book to carry along while traveling to some of the places that
Gross has visited – assuming your sensibilities are more or less the same as
his.

Travels in imaginary lands
have the advantage that they can be arranged just as the author wishes them to
be – think again of Gulliver’s Travels
– but when those lands are designed for exploration by preteens, as in the Otherworld Chronicles series, they tend
to have certain predictable characteristics. In fact, much of the fun of the
first two books in Nils Johnson-Shelton’s sequence comes from watching Artie
and Kay Kingfisher go on predictable quests in predictable ways with some
predictable results – but with everything just sufficiently skewed so that
readers will not quite know what is
coming next. The basic plot here is a familiar one for a modern preteen novel
series, involving a video game whose setting is real in a parallel dimension of
some sort (Vivian Vande Velde, among others, has used this trope successfully
several times for this age group of readers). What is also familiar, with a
character named Art(ie) King(fisher), is that the protagonist turns out to be a
reincarnation of King Arthur, complete with nobility and quest requirements and
Knights of the Round Table and all that. But these unsurprising elements are
nicely handled by Johnson-Shelton, who has a good sense of plot pacing and does
not delay the expected revelations – he gets them out of the way quickly so he
can develop the story. The King Arthur element, for example, shows up within 30
pages of the start of the first book: “I know much about you, Arthur. You have
nothing to fear from me. You are my king! You are my king and I am now and
forevermore at your service!”Johnson-Shelton does a reasonably good job of leavening the adventure
with levity, thanks in part to his chapter titles, most being of the “In Which”
variety: “In Which Artie Wonders, What the Heck Is a Font, Anyway?” “In Which
Artie and Kay Are Tested One More Freaking Time.” “In Which Artie Plays a
Little Let’s Make a Deal!” “In Which
Merlin Apologizes for Being an Insensitive Wizard.” And as for plot – well, in The Invisible Tower, originally
published last year and now available in paperback, Artie learns of his kingly
provenance and, having won the video game about Otherworld, has to find a way
to save the real Otherworld, which
comes complete with wolves and dragons and all those sorts of things. In The Seven Swords, the newly published
second book, Artie must send his knights to find the swords of the title; he
must battle giants and ogres and all those sorts of things; and he needs to deal
with a few surprises, such as the fact that the Peace Sword turns out to be the
weapon used by Mordred to kill the original King Arthur. There are enough
twists and turns in the Otherworld
Chronicles to keep the series interesting – and it is a series, not just a two-book sequence. Nevertheless, the
formulaic plot elements both in “quest” terms and in “video game” terms
somewhat hold back the entertainment value of Johnson-Shelton’s books. The
novels are not quite romps, not quite adventures to be taken seriously, not
fully innovative but not entirely derivative. They are a blend of pluses and
minuses, more positive than negative on the whole, but ultimately best for
readers who enjoy dialogue along these lines (Kay speaking to Artie): “Far out,
Your Kingliness.”

Microsoft made a number of
bold decisions, some better than others, in developing and launching its latest
operating system. For the first time since the days of Windows 3.1, it probably
had no choice. The world’s biggest software company is the world’s biggest because of two primary product lines:
operating systems and its Office
productivity suite. Both products are strongly tied to creativity using
personal computers, but the move of users away from desktops and laptops has
become a major and widely reported trend, with significant implications
throughout the industry. Ignoring the trend would imperil Microsoft’s very
underpinnings and its preeminence in the software field. But embracing it fully
creates a serious problem: portable devices such as smartphones and tablets are
very poor for content creation – they are small, clumsy and generally lack the
power of desktop and laptop machines. Although this may not always be true –
users who grow up with a significantly reduced form factor and a focus on mobility
will surely learn, over time, to produce creative material with portable units
of various types – for now, Microsoft cannot afford to turn its back on the
desktop-and-laptop-based world in which it made its mark and where it still
dominates other companies by far.

And so we have Windows 8, an operating system that
tries to straddle the line between traditional and mobile computing. Like most
compromises and transitional products, it is not fully satisfying from either perspective;
but unlike most, it is more satisfying than not in both uses.The new operating system is designed for
phones, tablets, laptops, desktops and servers, has a strong emphasis on
touchscreen capabilities, and is very clearly intended primarily for non-work
purposes. It is fun to use and makes consuming
information more enjoyable than any previous Windows version, but it makes producing documents and presentations
more difficult – relying, implicitly, on the understandable conservatism of
corporations that makes them very unlikely to abandon Windows-based computing
even when an operating system is not created with their needs in mind.

Microsoft can get away with
this in Windows 8 and maybe Windows 8.5 (if Microsoft creates one), but
probably not when Windows 9 or Windows 10 comes along – by that time, a few
years down the road, either there will be a much larger move to mobile and
touchscreen computing, or Microsoft will have to think more seriously about the
implications of its design for the users who form the backbone of its success.

In any case, what we have
now is Microsoft’s determination to maintain a single core operating system for
multiple uses, and one that has a single graphical user interface (GUI). This
is good for people who regularly switch among various hardware platforms and
good for developers, who can create programs – which, yes, Microsoft has now
joined the crowd in calling “apps” – for a single operating system and have
them function on a multitude of devices. The Windows 8 GUI, called Modern
(previously, and less pleasantly, “Metro”), is attractive to look at, a snap to
use on mobile devices, and often very frustrating in an office environment. Its
non-overlapping Start Screen windows (called tiles), which are customizable in
certain ways but not in others, are clearly touch-based, as are its basic
controls. The look is so stripped-down as to be sparse – which is not an issue
on smartphone or tablet screens, but does make a difference on larger monitors
in an office. Use of the Start Screen’s tiles is intelligent and largely
intuitive on a touch basis, but clumsy and uncomfortable when using a keyboard
and mouse. This is a great operating system for phone and tablet users who want
to spend their time visiting social networks, going shopping, and watching
YouTube videos – and it is a significantly more-secure Windows than ever, which
is a major enhancement that will be particularly important to mobile users,
even if they are unaware of it. Windows 8 makes it easy to find, download and
install apps (which, as part of the improved security, must be
Microsoft-approved), and it simply looks good enough to compete with anything
running Apple or Android operating systems.

The reality is that Windows
8 is deliberately designed for information consumers,
not for information creators, and it
may be that Microsoft sees “knowledge workers” as a decreasing part of its
market – which, statistically, is an accurate perception, since the total
worldwide use of mobile devices is growing far faster than the use of any computing devices for creative
purposes. Add in the fact that even though Microsoft had $18 billion in revenue
from operating systems last year, that is less than one-quarter of its total
revenue, and you have a good reason for the company to focus on mobile users
interested primarily in entertainment rather than on office workers in creative
environments – whose organizations are generally slow to adopt new operating
systems anyway.

So, to be fair to Windows 8,
it is necessary to look at what it does rather than what it does not do. And
what it does is really very impressive. In addition to its enhanced security,
this operating system boots and shuts down considerably more quickly than
Windows 7 did. It allows easy connectivity – part of its overall mobile focus –
so users can enter a single user name and password on Microsoft’s Live.com and
have instant authentication for tablets, desktops and laptops. Windows 8
verifies each time it starts that it has not been tampered with (Microsoft
calls this Secure Boot); it updates daily and automatically; and it includes
antivirus software that is enabled by default.

Windows 8 largely turns its
back on multitasking – a major strength of prior Microsoft operating systems
for knowledge workers, but a potential confusion for people who simply want to
obtain and use information simply. The tiles on the Start Screen represent
installed apps; click a tile and the application fills the screen; but there is
no way to see multiple apps or Web pages at the same time (although it is
possible to split the screen between two apps – but only by having one app take
up most of the screen and the other take up only a sliver of it). To switch
applications, users return to the Start Screen and click on another tile – no
big deal for mobile devices, but an irritation in an office environment.
Furthermore, the new Charms feature is really oriented 100% toward
touchscreens: it is a set of hidden menus accessible by swiping toward the
right side of a touchscreen, but reachable with a mouse only by the awkward
process of bringing the cursor to a corner of the screen, then moving the mouse
downward, then clicking on whatever Charm you may want – such as the
on/off/sleep control. This is an underlying characteristic of the new Windows 8
interface: to keep things simple and elegant-looking, Microsoft hides important
information under multiple clicks of a mouse or multiple touchscreen layers – a
minor inconvenience for smartphone and tablet information consumers but a
significant one for knowledge workers.

The easiest way around the
inconveniences for Windows 8 for people seeking to create information rather
than consume it is simply to go to the desktop, which is still part of the
operating system and easy to place as a tile on the Start Screen – then just click
the tile and the desktop appears (as an alternative, you can press the Windows
key + D). Yes, this move from Start Screen to desktop is an extra step, but it
is a small one, and if it becomes a real irritant, there are numerous free or
low-cost third-party apps that eliminate it and let you boot directly to the
desktop, as in Windows 7. But unless the extra few seconds seem really crucial,
there is little reason to use those apps, because the Modern interface or
something very like it is the direction in which all operating systems are
going. Becoming accustomed to this is a good idea – and really, an extra click
or two will not slow anyone down.

What does take getting used to is what happens when you are on the desktop in Windows 8: Microsoft
has eliminated the Start button, a notorious design decision that the company
says is irreversible but that it really ought to rethink. There are other ways
to get to all the Start functions in Windows 8; and, again, there are free or
low-cost third-party apps to restore the button. But in this case, unlike the
Start Screen situation, it is hard to see the benefit of living with
Microsoft’s change, especially since Windows 8 no longer has controls in a
consistent place. Leaving the Start button as a beacon of consistency would
seem to be sensible. For that matter, additional status bars and menus would be
very helpful in the knowledge-worker environment – the stripped-down
presentation of information in Windows 8, while entirely appropriate for small
screens and information consumers, is an ongoing annoyance on the
information-creation side of things. It can be fun to discover certain
unexpected features of Windows 8 – for example, if you are searching for
something specific, you can simply start typing directly on the Start Screen,
and the search box will open automatically. But if you just want to get down to
creative work, Windows 8 does not make that easy – and is not designed to do
so.

When you think about it,
what Microsoft has done with Windows 8 is the opposite of what it has done in
the past. Several times in recent history, it has tried to take its big-screen,
office-oriented interface and modify it for use on small screens – and the
results were very poor, causing many people to write Microsoft off as a major
player in an increasingly mobile world. Windows 8 shows that rumors of
Microsoft’s collapse were vastly premature. Windows 8 is a small-screen
interface from the start, elegantly designed and fully competitive with the
offerings from Apple and Google. It will be a real pleasure for phone and
tablet users, unlike previous repurposed Microsoft operating systems. But this
time, what the company has done is to start with a small-screen orientation and
adapt it to larger screens and an office environment. That transfers the
awkwardness from mobile users to knowledge workers – and, based strictly on
numbers, that is the right thing for Microsoft to do. The explosion of
worldwide use of mobile devices and the ongoing move toward touchscreens either
in tiny phone size or somewhat larger tablet size mean that first-time users of
hardware are far more likely to be information consumers than information
producers – and far more likely to value simplicity and attractiveness than
adaptability and multifunctional capability. Microsoft got Windows 8 right for a changing
world – and of course there is nothing compelling business users and other
content creators from switching to the new operating system (many are only now
making the change from XP to Windows 7, having bypassed Vista entirely).

Windows 8 is not all things
to everyone – and is not intended to be. Microsoft has seen the future of
computing devices, a future that extends well beyond the customary notion of
computers, and has taken the first step toward producing an operating system
that will thrive in that future. Windows 8 works perfectly well, if sometimes
frustratingly, with legacy hardware, which is what desktop and laptop computers
are becoming – and it is worth remembering that all Windows operating systems
are themselves built upon Microsoft’s ultimate legacy product, MS-DOS. Windows
8 has flaws and frustrations, but it shows that Microsoft has figured out where
the world of information consumption is going – and has staked out a strong
position there. This operating system may not be a game changer, but Windows 8 shows that Microsoft remains a game player, and is determined to embrace a
future that will look very different to users from the computing past.

Rediscoveries of little-known
music and little-known recordings can bring enormous pleasure to the very small
sampling of music lovers interested in a particular niche – sometimes a niche
within a niche. Or, in the case of 3 X
Offenbach, two separate niches – that of the composer’s very-little-known
one-act works and that of performances conducted by Carlos Kleiber (1930-2004).
Kleiber was a superb conductor and a very quirky personality even by the
standards of conductors, which is saying quite a bit. His entire discography,
before the rediscovery of 3 X Offenbach,
amounted to 12 CDs – a real shame, since his performances attained
near-legendary stature and the recordings that do survive remain in many cases
at the absolute pinnacle of interpretative quality. As for Offenbach, listeners
who know only a few of his works are unaware that he created nearly 100 stage
pieces in such well-known forms as opera and operetta and such related forms –
many of them invented by Offenbach himself – as opérette bouffe, opérette
fantastique, opéra comique, opéra bouffe, opéra féerie, opéra bouffes féeries, opéra
bouffon, bouffonnerie musicale, saynète,
revue, and pièce d’occasion. Small wonder that Offenbach’s creativity
was considered supreme for a time – and not just because Orphée aux enfers was the first
full-length classical operetta. Offenbach’s early music was hamstrung by a
French law, not changed until 1858, that restricted musical theater works other
than grand opera to three singers and perhaps some mute characters. Even after
the law changed, Offenbach created many pieces in or based on this restricted
mode – and they were often quite wonderful. But they are very rarely performed
nowadays – which brings us to 3 X Offenbach, in which three one-act
amusements, translated into German, were turned into a full evening’s
entertainment by Austrian director Renato Mordo. Kleiber conducted 3 X
Offenbach in his first performance at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in 1962; a
performance later that year was recorded; and that performance was broadcast in
July 1963 – and has now been released by Profil. However, there is more to this
story: the professional recording was lost, apparently destroyed, and what is
heard in remastered but genuinely execrable sound on Profil is based on two
amateur recordings made of the radio broadcast – except that one recorder
failed part of the way through the performance, so only the second one was
available for Die Insel Tulipatan.
In some ways a comedy of errors, in some ways a tragedy of lost opportunity, the
recording of Kleiber’s 3 X Offenbach
is a delight for anyone interested in the conductor and anyone interested in
less-known Offenbach sung in German. (Actually, Offenbach was German, and his works were often performed in translation. In
fact, Orphée aux enfers was first heard
on Broadway in German translation, in 1861.) The performances are bright,
bouncy, swift (Kleiber conducts with tremendous energy), and sometimes
weightier than expected (Kleiber clearly saw Offenbach as a more-substantial
composer than many deem him to be). The sound restoration must have been a
Herculean task, and it is sad to have to say that the result is still poor.
Modern listeners unfamiliar with tape hiss and “wow” (which occurred when audio
tape stretched during recording, causing distortion on playback) will soon
learn what they are from this recording and will not likely enjoy the
experience. 3 X Offenbach reaches out to a very small audience, but
members of the group will greet it with enthusiasm.

There is enjoyment as well in Leo Fall’s The
Rose of Stambul, but here too the pleasure will reach out to a limited
group – although not because of the Naxos recording, whose quality is quite
good, and not because of the English-language 2011 performance by Chicago Folks
Operetta, which is also very well done and in which the translation (here from
German) does no harm to the work. The issue here is simply that this work by
Fall (1873-1925) is not very substantial. Fall was scarcely the only composer
of his time to be fascinated by the “exoticism” of life in Turkey at the time
of the Ottoman Empire, which was in the process of collapse when The Rose of
Stambul was first produced in 1916. No less than Sir Arthur Sullivan had
used a very similar setting in his last completed stage work, The Rose of
Persia (1899; libretto by Basil Hood). But while Sullivan’s work nicely
balanced its exotic setting with some very Mikado-like machinations and
confusions, Fall’s – with libretto by Robert Bodanzky (1879-1923) – essentially
has only one very weak plot point: Kondja Gul, daughter of Kemal Pasha, is
ordered by her father to marry Achmed Bey, but is in love with French poet André Lery, whom she has never met – and who turns out to be Achmed Bey’s nom
de plume. The comedy, such as it is, comes from Kondja’s simultaneous
acceptance and rejection of the same man. There is the usual “second couple” of
operetta – Midili, one of Kondja’s companions, and Fridolin Müller, timid son of a German businessman. There is some moderately
amusing business in Act III, set in “The Honeymoon Hotel” in Switzerland, where
everything is eventually worked out. But other scenes, such as the wedding
night in which Kondja locks Achmed out of the bedroom and flees, carry neither
pathos nor much fun. And the underlying premise of The Rose of Stambul,
about the confinement of women in the Ottoman realm (Stambul is another name
for Istanbul) and their inability to act, think or love as they wish, is belied
by what actually happens, when both Midili and Kondja leave the harem and head
for Switzerland without any apparent difficulty. There are overly silly scenes
for Fridolin – in one of which he dresses as a woman and sings falsetto, and in
another of which he repeatedly insists that his new bride, Midili, call him
“snookie.” And while there are some memorable numbers in The Rose of
Stambul, including one with the neat translation, “Love filled with fire
and passion unfolds in a magical way./ Love in the Viennese fashion is what we
should practice today,” Fall belabors the good tunes and repeats them so often
that they start to lose their charm. The singers are fine in this performance,
and John Frantzen keeps the pace up and the plot moving forward. But The
Rose of Stambul is just too frothy to have much staying power. In
its time, it was immensely popular; now, however, it comes across as a period
piece that contains some amusing moments and some pleasant music, but not
enough of either to make it seem a significant rediscovery.

There is something
particularly loving about springtime, when the world grows green and flowery –
and although there are specific “love” holidays in the form of Mother’s Day and
Father’s Day, they are scarcely the sole expressions of caring and warmth in a
season in which the days grow longer and move toward the sultry. Books for children
ages 4-8 seem especially open and unaffected in this season. Tiptoe Joe, for example, is not tied
directly to any specific holiday or occurrence, but it is a very loving and
very cute book all the same. The title character is a huge brown bear wearing a
perpetual smile and a pair of sneakers. He looks just ridiculous enough to
bring a smile to any young reader’s face – and when he waves directly to
readers, breaking the so-called “fourth wall” that normally keeps characters
boxed within a book, he is altogether winning. The story is super-simple:
Tiptoe Joe meets several other animals and tells each to “come with me./ I know
something you should see.” And each animal – donkey, rabbit, turkey, moose, owl
and beaver – duly follows along, making more noise than does Tiptoe Joe himself
(although not too much more). And the surprise that Tiptoe Joe eventually
reveals to them all is as adorable and sweet as can be.

A Special Gift for Grammy is a much more complicated and thoughtful
book for the same age range. It is about a boy named Hunter who gives his
grandmother a gift: a pile of stones that he has picked up, one by one, from
the road. Hunter’s father asks what they are for, and Hunter says Grammy will
do “what everyone does with a pile of stones.” His father agrees – and so does
Grammy after she asks the same question and gets the same answer.What is neat is what Grammy does do with the stones – or rather what
other people do with them in their interactions with her. The stones turn out
to be very useful to a number of people, in some straightforward but also very
clever ways. And at last there are just six small stones left. When Hunter
returns to Grammy’s house, he figures out what five of the six represent – and
then Grammy figures out how to keep those stones very close to her heart. And
the very last stone? Grammy and Hunter enjoy that one together in an ending
that makes perfect sense and lovingly cements a tale of multigenerational
understanding.

Books targeted specifically
at Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are often more straightforward than this. Splat the Cat: The Perfect Present for Mom
& Dad works equally well for either “parental” day or for both – or,
really, for neither, since Splat says he is simply making his parents a present
“to show how much he loved them.” But the gift-making becomes competitive when
Splat’s sister and brother decide to make presents for their parents, too, and
Splat thinks that theirs are better than his. All three kittens are soon going
back to work to make ever-better gifts, and then even better ones. But before things get completely out of hand, the
three decide to make a present together – and, not surprisingly, create
something elaborate that incorporates everything that have previously made.
What this turns out to be is a homemade fish tank filled with objects created
by the three kittens (Splat makes the fish) – and what the kittens then end up with is a hilarious
conclusion in which some nearby seagulls find the tank so realistic that…well,
let’s just say that the tank doesn’t last very long, and the three downcast
kittens are left sighing, “Awww…”But at
the very end, everyone is happy again, because Mom and Dad are delighted with
the present (or what remains of it), and even more delighted with the
thoughtfulness of the kittens who made it for them. A page of stickers provides
extra fun in a book whose amusing silliness never displaces its underlying
warmth of spirit.

Two new Berenstain Bears
books are targeted directly at Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and are typically
straightforward (+++) celebrations of wholesomeness, Bear Country style. The
books are all about everyday family things that Mama Bear and Papa Bear do for
their cubs. Theirs is a very traditional family: Mama cooks, sews clothes,
heals minor injuries, does the laundry, gives baths and reads stories; Papa
plays sports, pulls the kids’ sled, carries the cubs on his shoulders, and
tells “funny stories and corny jokes.” In the Mother’s Day book, the cubs,
inspired by a visit to their grandparents and a view of the older bears’
scrapbook, make a similar book for Mama, including pictures of “all the things
that Mama would want to remember about her cubs growing up.” And of course Mama
says it is “the most wonderful Mother’s Day gift I have ever gotten!” The cubs
think of making a scrapbook for Papa, too – but Father’s Day comes later than
Mother’s Day, and Brother Bear reminds Sister Bear that they “just gave Mama an
album like that.” So the cubs, noticing that Papa is always doing work around
the house, decide to make him “gift certificates” that he can redeem to have them
do the chores. They follow him around, taking note of the many things he does,
and give him a day off for Father’s Day – but it isn’t quite a day off, because the cubs can’t really get things done as
well as Papa does, and they keep needing his help. This does not bother him at
all: “I’m getting bored just watching TV. It’s more fun doing things with you.”
So everyone works together, and then plays together, and Father’s Day proves to
be as big a success as Mother’s Day was. As always, the Berenstain Bears books
are old-fashioned and perhaps a little too perfectly pulled together for all
tastes, but kids and parents who like the characters will certainly enjoy
joining them for this latest seasonal celebration.

Here are a couple of very
different books whose positioning in the real world has a certain unreal feel
about it. The How-To Handbook is, on
the face of it, as real-world as they come. It is a very short (128-page) guide
to doing all sorts of things that are part of everyday life but that young
people – and, to be honest, allegedly full-fledged adults – may not know how to
do…or how to find out how to do. What is the right way to catch a spider
without harming it or yourself? How do you pitch a tent? What if you need to
tie a bow tie? Is there a good way to pop a pimple? What do you do if you have
a ring that just won’t come off? What is the best way to wash a car? Fold a
fitted sheet? Unstick chewing gum? Extract a splinter? Make your own trail mix?
Officially targeted at teenagers, The
How-To Handbook is one of those items at which adults, if they are honest
with themselves, will want to sneak an occasional peek. Martin Oliver and
Alexandra Johnson boil down the information here to bare essentials, including
very useful diagrams (for wrapping a package, for example) in addition to lots
of purely illustrative pictures that break up the text and keep the overall
feel of this essentially serious book on the light side. What gives the whole
thing a slight air of unreality is the juxtaposition of such different
information, all of it treated in matter-of-fact snippets. There are, for
example, two pages on how to chop an onion – with six helpful illustrations and
a warning box about paying attention when using sharp knives. Later, there is a
single page on how to take a pulse to find out whether someone is alive or dead
– and to determine how seriously injured the person may be. From pulses to
produce, the information is given in a straightforward, accessible manner, but
the amount of space devoted to each item seems a trifle odd when looked at from
an “importance” perspective – fixing a flat bike tire, for example, gets four
full pages, with diagrams, and involves 22 separate steps, while “help a
choking victim” gets one page, four steps and no pictures. Of course, the real
world itself is not always perfectly balanced, to put it mildly. So at least in
some sense, the highly useful information in The How-To Handbook is simply presented in a way that reflects the
organization, or disorganization, of everyday life.

The extent to which Mark
Tatulli’s pantomime comic strip, Liō,
does or does not take place in some sort of real world, is another matter
altogether. And it is part of what makes this often-dark strip so much fun.
Tatulli plays with reality constantly here, and plays with concepts as well:
the new Liō book, Making Friends, actually has the title
character assembling buddies by manufacturing robots. Many elements of Liō clearly take place in a real world
of sorts: Liō encounters bullies, goes to school, has homework, lives with his
father (whom Tatulli usually shows with one toe protruding through a sock), and
has an unrequited crush on a girl named Eva Rose. And many of the odd elements
of the strip are clearly intended to occur in the strip’s “real world”: Liō’s
pet cephalopod interacts with many people, his father comforts him when one of Liō’s
destructive robots self-destructs, dad insists Liō wear a helmet before taking
off using his homemade jet pack, and Liō’s favorite TV channel – the Weird Kid
Television Network – can be viewed by anyone so inclined. But what about items
in Liō that cross some clear but
unspecified line? How about the bomb that Eva Rose arranges to have dropped on Liō
on his birthday (she is upset when it doesn’t go off)? Liō as Pied Piper,
rescuing seafood from a restaurant – with lobsters, crabs and other water
dwellers following him out the door? Liō selling tickets to kids for a climb up
the magic beanstalk – while the giant stands menacingly behind him? Liō aboard
a giant ant, leading other giant ants to a picnic? Liō being picked up and
menaced by an angry plant that he is about to attack with weed killer? Liō
driving a jingle-jangling truck with a brain mounted on top and being followed
by eager zombies waving money? Liō taking payment from a witch to use his jet
pack to fly around trailing a sign that says “Surrender Dorothy”? Liō’s “undead
bunny” stuffed toy swallowing a bully whole and then needing “alka-tummy” for
an upset stomach? How much of this happens in the world of father, school,
stores and restaurants, and how much is entirely in Liō’s head? Tatulli isn’t
saying, which is all to the good, because in addition to the many oddities of Liō, trying to figure out just what sort
of reality, or alternative reality, or unreality the strip occupies is a major
reason for reading and enjoying this very unusual comic creation.

Who Was Dracula? Bram Stoker’s
Trail of Blood. By Jim Steinmeyer. Tarcher/Penguin. $26.95.

Whether they are old, ugly
and deeply evil or young, attractive and ambivalent in their loyalties and
concerns, all modern-day versions of vampires ultimately take their cues from
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula.
Whether today’s vampires are created in the mode of Stoker’s or deliberately
developed in a different direction, Stoker’s character looms over them all. But
where does Stoker’s vampire come
from? That is the question that Jim Steinmeyer, author of several books about
stage magic and stage history, sets out to answer in Who Was Dracula?

Many people today know that
there was a historical figure called Dracula, a 15th-century ruler who
was named Vlad the Impaler and known as “Dracula” (“son of the dragon”) and
feared or celebrated widely – depending on which side you were on – for his
bloodthirsty cruelty and his method of disposing of enemies by impaling their
bodies and putting them on display. But a direct line from Wallachian prince Vlad Țepeș to Dracula cannot be drawn, Steinmeyer argues, because
Stoker used the long-ago ruler’s name but grafted onto it characteristics of
celebrities of the 19th century.

Stoker’s
Dracula, says Steinmeyer, is “a pastiche of living historical characters,”
specifically including poet Walt Whitman, playwright Oscar Wilde, famed stage
star Henry Irving (whose biography Stoker wrote), and shadowy mass murderer
Jack the Ripper. Using Stoker’s own notes and information on the history of the
theater in Victorian London, examining the events in Stoker’s own life before Dracula and while he was creating the
novel, Steinmeyer fascinatingly traces the creation of the book’s central
character as an amalgamation of real-life but larger-than-life personalities.
He also points out one of Stoker’s greatest accomplishments, which has allowed
Dracula and vampires in general to be differently interpreted and reinterpreted
for more than a century: Dracula, an
epistolary novel, contains very little information about its title character,
which means that a great deal about who or what Dracula is must be left to the
reader’s imagination – an imagination that conjures up greater depth and more
horrors than Stoker himself would have been able to present in his writing
(which, as Steinmeyer points out, has a number of generally-agreed-upon flaws).

Steinmeyer’s
theatrical knowledge and interests skew his analysis of Stoker and Dracula, but
Stoker was, in fact, a man of the theater, and a great deal of what Steinmeyer
argues or unearths makes sense. He points out, for example, that the Dracula
with whom most people today are familiar is not Stoker’s but the character at
the heart of a British play of the 1920s. Stoker’s own character, for all his
comparatively small role in the book about him, is considerably deeper and
stranger than most readers of Steinmeyer’s book will realize.

Steinmeyer is
at times too determined to be scholarly in Who
Was Dracula? The result is a style that tends to lurch and even bore: “The
noted Dracula researcher Elizabeth
Miller has demonstrated how Van Helsing’s account was completely drawn from
[William] Wilkinson’s book and four other sources, as noted in Stoker’s papers,
and then stitched together with assumptions.” Or: “The store consisted of many
of the finest hand-painted drops, the most artistic castle interiors,
cityscapes, and gardens, props, armor, platforms, and walls. It was the work of
the finest scenic painters in the world, the designs of the finest technicians,
the pictures that had formed the frame for Henry Irving’s artistry.” Much of
this level of detail will be utterly fascinating for readers interested in theater history but decidedly less so
for those looking for a greater focus on literary
history and on Dracula in particular.

Some
theatrical details, though, are telling and distinctly humanizing, such as the
story of Irving’s love for his dog, a terrier named Fussie that died backstage
after falling into an open trapdoor while trying to get a ham sandwich out of a
coat that a workman had dropped on the floor. “Only after the performance did
they break the sad news, each man removing his hat and bowing his head as poor
Fussie was handed over to Irving.”

Scattered
throughout the book are details about Stoker’s own life and career and how his
creation of Dracula fit into them,
plus considerable information on the people from whom Steinmeyer believes
Stoker pulled together the character of his most famous literary creation. Not
all of this will be equally enthralling to readers, but the portions of the
book directly devoted to Dracula will
be, such as the fact that Stoker singlehandedly created virtually all the
elements of vampire lore that seem so familiar today – what vampires must do to
continue to exist, the underlying sexuality of the vampire’s bite and the
“spreading moral pestilence” it represents, how vampires can be destroyed, and
much more. Also of considerable interest will be Steinmeyer’s information on
Stoker’s original, more-elaborate ending of the novel, and on the
inconsistencies within the book. Like Dracula
itself, Steinmeyer’s book is sometimes overdone and not always elegant in
style, but there is more than enough fascinating material in it to make it a
highly worthwhile read for anyone wanting to know more about the real-world
connections of the most famous vampire of them all.

Here is the latest
repackaging of old wine in new bottles, old advice in new form, old thinking in
new guise – yet done with enough élan and stylishness to make the whole
presentation attractive and to refresh some ideas that have been around for
quite some time. Marc Schoen, an assistant clinical professor at UCLA’s Geffen
School of Medicine, focuses in his classes on mind-body relationships and
performance under pressure. Extending those notions to life outside the
university, he talks in Your Survival
Instinct Is Killing You about the often-invoked fight-or-flight response,
here called Survival Instinct, and the fact that it is ill-suited to the modern
world. Our bodies, integrally designed to perceive physical threats and
automatically alter somatic processes so those threats can be faced head-on or escaped,
nowadays exist in a nearly perpetual state of threat-related arousal, because
so many events of everyday life are perceived as dangerous in non-physical ways
– and our hormonal and nervous systems have no way to distinguish emotional or
mental discomforts from genuine life-or-death emergencies.

This perception is nothing
new; it underlies many studies, medical and self-help and pop-culture, of
stress, relaxation, hormonal balance, and so forth. But Schoen and Kristin
Loberg – whose specific contributions to the book are not enumerated, but
presumably involve making the whole thing coherent and as presentable as
possible – come up with some new ways to evaluate the state of chronic
discomfort that they call “agitance” (the word itself being one of those new
elements). There is, for example, the “agitance checklist” of 32 questions
designed to measure “activities or behaviors that typically stoke” this state
of perpetual, albeit often low-level, discomfort. The questions are perfectly
reasonable: “Do you find it difficult to slow down?” “Are you uncomfortable in
idle time without structure?” “Do you find it difficult to turn off your mind
at bedtime?” “When you think about food, do you find yourself wanting to eat,
even though you aren’t hungry?” And so on. A losing score on this test is 31% –
that is, if you answer yes to 10 or more questions, “your agitance is
increasingly more [sic] palpable” and you are heading for physical or mental
discomfort, if you are not there already.

Schoen dresses up his
discussion of this sort of imbalance with recent research, and it is this that
lends Your Survival Instinct Is Killing
You a somewhat updated feel while clothing it in medical terminology. For
example, Schoen says, “A great way to illustrate the limbic brain’s
overpowering quality is to consider post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” and
then cites research showing “an exaggerated amygdala response” with a
“diminished cerebral or prefrontal lobe response” in PTSD sufferers, coupling
this with the very well-known finding that many people say they would rather
face a cancer diagnosis than speak in front of a large group. Elsewhere, Schoen
writes of the inflammatory response – which has been repeatedly linked to a
host of bodily ills, including cardiovascular disease – and explains how the
“conditioning of maladaptive habits…can actually occur…at the cellular and
biochemical levels.” Schoen’s discussion of inflammation is in fact balanced –
he points out that it is a way the body mounts defenses against attack,
although his way of putting this is rather inelegant: “So the intentions of
inflammation are salubrious.” But his basic point is that the mind-body
connection has fundamental flaws nowadays for people who live, as so many of us
do, in a constant state of at least low-level anxiety – and that the resulting
“agitance” has become a foundational problem of everyday life.

What to do about it? That is
the key here, as in all the other studies of similar issues: the prescriptive
part of books like this is even more important than the descriptive part. Schoen
offers “fifteen proven ways to help you gain control of your agitance,” and
like the recommendations in other “slow down and take it easy” books, they are
attractively presented – but rather more difficult to put into practice; just
how difficult will depend on each individual, of course. The 15 ideas are to
take periodic technology time-outs, stopping all interactions with work-related
technology regularly; valuing and tolerating imperfection; limiting sensory
input by periodically “focusing on stimulating one or two sensory channels at
the same time”; calming down at bedtime; slowing down in general (“S-L-O-W
Down” is the way Schoen puts it); ending procrastination; no longer trying to
get everything done; accepting and embracing uncertainty; letting go of anger;
keeping a regular schedule; enlarging one’s comfort zone; learning to “take a
breather” using “the Schoen Breath Technique”; delaying gratification;
practicing just hanging out; and exercising. There is considerable overlap
among many of these recommendations, and in a number of cases a presentation
designed to sound new is just a repackaging: the Schoen Breath Technique, for
example, is simply the well-worn notion of controlled breathing. To Schoen’s
credit, he says again and again that his recommended approaches need not be
time-consuming, and need not all be
done in order to reduce “agitance.” He also shows ways to “manage your
discomfort by boosting your tolerance for it” if “you’re already in the red
zone” – notions such as identifying things for which you are grateful and
engaging with a social network. And he dresses these concepts up in language
with a vague New Age feel: “The Creation of Alignment” and “Achieve Duality”
are two subheads in a chapter called “Taking the ‘Dis’ Out of Discomfort.”

There is nothing wrong and a
great deal right in much of what Schoen recommends. And his underlying analysis
is certainly reasonable: “As long as our survival instinct rushes to stand up
and shield us from anticipated emotional pain, we find ourselves entrapped by
our instinctual primitive responses, such as anger, paralysis, overeating,
illness, aggression, and withdrawal.” But Your
Survival Instinct Is Killing You overreaches both by trying to handle all
those negative elements at one time and by attempting to come across with a
revelatory approach that is really nothing particularly new or special, however
useful it may be for those who are able to practice it (and it is not as easy
to put into practice as Schoen suggests). A well-meaning book with some good
advice, Your Survival Instinct Is Killing
You has an unnecessarily negative title – its positive-sounding subtitle is
actually more indicative of Schoen’s approach and attitude, and the book might have
been more attractive if it were called Retrain
Your Brain to Conquer Fear. The title, though, is a marketing decision; the
contents are an authorial one. And Schoen’s contents, however carefully
presented and cleverly labeled by him and Loberg, are ultimately not
revolutionary or even particularly unusual. His ideas are good, but they have
been good when offered by other authors in the past and will be good when they
are no doubt offered by still others in the future. Choosing Schoen’s
particular presentation of these concepts will therefore be a matter of whether
or not you like his style, not whether or not he has something genuinely new to
say.

The advent of Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Office 2013 means that we have
arrived at yet another of those crossroads that most home and small-business
computer users would just as soon avoid – but that are an inevitable effect of
progress in the world of computer software. Some might prefer the neutral word
“development” to “progress,” arguing that what is newer is not necessarily
better; and that is a worthwhile philosophical point – but it does not apply to
Microsoft's new Office products,
because what is new in them is better
in many, many ways. There are, however, frustrating decision-making necessities
before you can get to all the good new elements.

Microsoft is now migrating
its venerable Office suite to a
subscription model rather than the now-old-fashioned physical-product model, at
least in the developed world. The subscription model has its own perfectly
satisfactory history, having been used successfully for many years by, for
example, computer-security companies: any individual or business using
Symantec’s Norton Internet Security
or Norton 360, for instance,
understands the arrangement perfectly well and will have no problem with it. It
simply means that instead of installing software from a physical medium, you
download it and have it set up from “the cloud” (that rather silly but
now-ubiquitous way of referring to Internet-based storage and operations). Your
usage of the software is tracked online, you get notice when your subscription
is about to expire, and you sign up for another year of usage to guarantee
seamless continuing operations at your location.

As Microsoft handles this
subscription system, there is a lot more to it. Microsoft provides the full Office
experience – every single component of the suite – to PC-using subscribers; promises
to provide ongoing free upgrades to Office
during the subscription term; includes 27 gigabytes of cloud storage through
its SkyDrive system (the seven gigs
that anyone can have for free, plus an additional 20); provides 60 minutes per
month of free international Skype calls to landlines in most countries, and to
mobile phones in seven places (Canada, China, Guam, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico,
Singapore and Thailand); and lets you install Microsoft Office 365 on up to five computers – a cost per computer
of just $20 a year if you use all five installations.

Microsoft Office 365 installs easily, runs quickly, includes all
functionality from the previous iteration of the suite (Microsoft Office 2010), and is specifically designed to integrate
with Windows 8, whose overall look and color scheme it shares. The new suite
works on touch-screen devices, such as tablets and laptops running Windows 8
(another part of the integration of Office
with Microsoft’s latest operating system). And it springs from an underlying
assumption that the future of productivity lies in multiple places rather than
a fixed office: users get to stream a full-featured version of Microsoft Office 365 to any Windows 7 or
Windows 8 PC that does not have the suite installed if they want to work at
remote locations or on unfamiliar computers. This is the first Office that goes everywhere, anytime.

But. Ah yes, the notorious
“but” that makes decision-making on new software products so frustrating. How
much creative developmental work do you actually do in multiple locations? If
the answer is “a lot,” Microsoft Office
365 makes a lot of sense; if the answer is “none” or “not much,” the
picture changes. How many computers do you need to have running Office all the time? If the answer is
four or five, Microsoft Office 365 is
a great choice; if the answer is one, maybe not. How comfortable are you with
long-term commitment to Microsoft’s suite? If you have already used it for
years and have upgraded whenever a new version has come out, Microsoft Office 365 may be ideal; if not
– or if you are considering alternatives to Microsoft’s products, such as Google Docs – you may not want to lock
yourself into the subscription model, which exists from a business standpoint
largely so people will lock
themselves into it long-term. How many components of Microsoft Office 365 do you already use regularly or have definite
plans to use in the future? If you use essentially the whole suite – which
includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access – then
Microsoft Office 365 may be just what
you need. If not – well, you cannot customize the installation of this version
of Office, and you will pay for and
get everything in it if you are using PCs. And what if you do not use PCs? Well
then, are you committed to Office for
Mac? How committed? Microsoft Office 365
is not quite the same for Macs as for PCs: it omits OneNote, Publisher and
Access and does not offer the streaming feature (although there are workarounds
for it). Is that all right with you?

A more-general question is
this: do you actually create, or intend to create, significant content on
tablets and other portable and/or touch-screen devices? If so, Microsoft Office 365 can be a great
productivity booster; if not, it may well be more than you need – or simply not
the right software at all. Let’s be realistic about this. The vast majority of
users of mobile devices – smartphones, tablets and all the rest – want to consume information, not create it. Small-screen, highly portable
devices are ideal for observing things, looking at things, checking in with
people, staying connected while on the road, and so forth. Indeed, Great
Britain’s Institution of Engineering and Technology has encapsulated the
appeal of mobile devices in general by saying that the billion-dollar-a-year
telecommunications industry is driven by “an array of technologies, resulting in
the average mobile being used to take photos, play music and games, send
emails, download maps, watch video clips, all as well as talking and texting.”
There is nothing in that evaluation about any significant sort of creativity or
business applicability.

The fact is that current and
planned mobile devices are far from ideal for producing reports, brochures,
spreadsheets, newsletters and anything else that may be important for your
business or family. For the vast majority of genuine productivity, a
full-featured computer (desktop or laptop) remains a far better choice than the
latest portable gadget, and is likely to retain its primacy for some time to
come.

Microsoft is playing it
smart with Microsoft Office 365 by
making it compatible across multiple platforms and focusing on several
next-generation elements of connectivity, such as touch screens. Microsoft is
also being cagey about this, boosting its corporate image as well as its
positioning in the increasingly mobile world of developed countries by taking
one of its two primary moneymakers (operating systems being the other) and
adapting it for all sorts of mobile applications. But from the point of view of
many individuals and families, and emphatically
from the point of view of many businesses, Microsoft is getting ahead of things
here – not ahead of itself, but ahead of many of its loyal customers. Microsoft Office 365 can do lots of
things extremely well – and look good doing them, by the way – but it is ahead
of its time in terms of how people create
things, although not in terms of how they consume
them.

This is nowhere clearer than
in the method by which Microsoft Office
365 saves whatever you make with it. The default “save” option is to the
cloud, to SkyDrive; hence that 27-gig
total of storage space (and you can buy more, of course). You can save what you create on a local
computer, but the whole point of the mobility emphasis of Microsoft Office 365 is that your documents, brochures,
spreadsheets and all the rest will be stored online and accessible on any device,
anywhere, anytime, by anyone authorized to gain access through your account. How
comfortable are you with that? This is a serious question for many individuals
and families as well as for virtually all businesses. By now, it has become
commonplace to store backups online,
and there is clearly a rising comfort level about that level of dependence on
“cloud computing.” But how comfortable are you putting, say, all your company’s
strategic plans and projected financial data on SkyDrive? With the ever-increasing sophistication of hackers,
individually and in groups; with DDoS attacks proliferating; with supposedly
secure sites of all kinds turning out to have backdoor vulnerabilities; with
ubiquitous elements of Internet communication, such as Java, being found to
have enormous security holes; with all this and more, just how dependent on
Internet storage and retrieval are you comfortable being? Of course, you can
opt for local storage of whatever you create with Microsoft Office 365, but that defeats a major purpose of this
redesigned software suite: collaborative tools that simplify multi-location
work both by people who travel from place to place and by multiple individuals
in different locations.

Microsoft clearly sees a subscription
model for a full-featured Office
suite, with multi-device compatibility and cloud storage, as the future; and it
is probably right about all that, even though such a future is not here quite
yet. In fact, Microsoft has not stopped selling packaged versions of Office altogether; yes, there is a Microsoft Office 2013. You can buy, for
example, Office Home & Student 2013
for $140 and install it on a single local computer. This is down from the three
installations permitted with Office 2010,
but at least Microsoft has abandoned its original, much-discussed and
understandably much-maligned consumer-unfriendly position that a single
installation would be the only one allowed, even if you switched computers or
your hard drive crashed. The packaged versions of the software, though – which
also include Office Home and Business
2013 for $220 and Office Professional
2013 for $400 – are clearly heading toward becoming legacy products, and
are really not good buys unless you have very specifically limited,
single-computer needs for Office.
Furthermore, the packaged versions will not get the promised automatic updates
that are potentially a very valuable feature of Microsoft Office 365; and the only packaged version that includes all the programs that come with Microsoft Office 365 is the overpriced Professional product.

Well, what if you opt for Microsoft Office 365 and discover, as
your year’s subscription nears its end, that you have not used a lot of its
features and are no longer enamored of the suite? What happens to all your
work? That is a concern that sounds like a bigger deal than it is: if you let
your subscription lapse, you lose access to the components of Microsoft Office 365 but not to whatever
you have created with it – you will still be able to get to and open your
documents with a boxed version of Office,
through Microsoft’s Office Web Apps,
or even through a competitor such as Google
Docs. Still, if this happens, it will likely be a significant
inconvenience, especially if you have used the default storage setting and kept
your creations online.

Therefore – and here we are at the
crossroads – you really do need to try to project your likely use of the
components of Microsoft Office 365
into the future; the extent to which you are comfortable with cloud storage and
multi-location creative work; the chances that you will do creative things on a
wide variety of devices now or in the near future; and the depth of your
commitment to the entire Office
experience. Until you do that analysis for yourself, your family or your
business, you will not have a good handle on how useful Microsoft Office 365 will be in your everyday life now and,
presumably, when you re-subscribe to it in years to come. The bottom line is
that Office remains the best, most
full-featured productivity suite anywhere, and its newest iteration really is
its best yet, with wonderfully seamless functionality, an attractively
coordinated appearance, tremendous capabilities within every single component,
and collaborative elements that significantly exceed anything Microsoft has
offered before. Microsoft has a clear road map of the future of Office, and Microsoft Office 365 shows the way admirably. However, the future
toward which Microsoft Office 365 points
– one in which mobile devices are founts of creativity and cloud storage is
simple, safe and tremendously secure – is not here yet, and it is by no means
certain that that particular future will be the one that emerges in the next
few years. If you agree with Microsoft’s vision of where office and personal
productivity is heading, then you absolutely will not go wrong with Microsoft Office 365. Just be sure that
you do agree that this approach is
the future for you, your family or your business before you make the commitment
to begin annual subscriptions to a product that intends to be the foundation of
pretty much everything you create for a very long time to come.